Periodically, a highly anticipated item is made available for sale by a merchant who incurs rapid inventory depletion due to high consumer demand of the item. Parents seem to deal with this reoccurring event each holiday season when the item is the latest child's toy that is often out-of-stock at retailers due to inventory depletion. Although fast selling items benefit merchants, these situations also present many challenges. One common problem is managing customer satisfaction. When a customer has a negative experience with a merchant, the customer may discontinue business with that merchant, or sometimes even worse, discourage others from continuing business with the merchant.
Customer satisfaction may be lowered when available items are purchased by another party that intends to exploit the item's popularity and offer the item for resale at a higher price. For example, a reseller may try to purchase many items before other consumers have an opportunity to purchase the item, thus quickly depleting the item's inventory, and thus the ability for others to obtain the item. Although many merchants try to limit the quantity of items per transaction, such limits are often easy to circumvent.
Prior to electronic commerce (e-commerce), people would sometimes spend hours or even days standing in line waiting for a chance to purchase an item, such as a ticket to see a world famous music performer. However, in the widely used e-commerce environment, no equivalent to standing in line exists. Consequentially, limiting quantities of items sold to each customer becomes even more challenging in the e-commerce environment than in traditional environments, such as a brick and mortar environment. One difficulty in e-commerce is the use of Internet robots (bots) that resellers sometimes create to automatically purchase popular items. Some resellers may employ bots that search for items made available on a network and then have the bots make multiple purchases of these items on behalf of the reseller. Often, these bots are sophisticated and capable of creating user accounts for each item purchased, thus circumventing (or spoofing) conventional quantity limitation restrictions used by the merchants.
Sometimes merchants offer a pre-order for popular or highly anticipated items, which enables a customer to order an item prior to the date that the item is released. Pre-orders do not limit resellers from participating in the process. Thus, resellers may preorder large quantities of the items, often using bots that disguise the identity of the reseller.
Other merchants may present captchas, a type of challenge-response test that may include an image of letters and/or numbers to users. The letters and numbers may be distorted or otherwise obscured such that a computer process (e.g., bot) has difficulty translating the letters and numbers, but are relatively easy for a human to discern. Such a captcha requests that the customer correctly translate the image to a typed input prior to accepting a transaction request for processing. However, these additional processes create extra work for legitimate customers. They may also be circumvented by using human intervention when a bot reaches the image translation point in the sale, thus making it still fairly easy to circumvent the quantity restriction.